19 Jan
2014
19 Jan
'14
3:27 p.m.
On 01/17/2014 11:34 AM, John Wilson wrote:
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 06:21:12AM -0800, Al Kossow
wrote:
Maybe. I've certainly seen quite a few cases of it for smaller machines,
but in those situations the hardware was affordable for individuals, and so
the (ex-)employees had an example at home with them. With the larger and
more expensive systems, it's perhaps less likely that code was taken away,
because the opportunity to compile and test prior to bringing it back to
work would be less.
cheers
Jules
I admire their tenacity and unwillingness to
accept the fact that
it is highly unlikely the software has survived.
It may be unlikely, but we've had some big surprises before.
There was a thread on slashdot a while back where a retired programmer was
asking how he should handle "reverse industrial espionage", where the
company had lost some old code and was hiring back its retired ex-programmers
to recreate it from scratch. Naturally he'd brought a copy home back in
the old days and still had the tape, so he was wondering how to handle this
obvious good news w/o getting in big trouble for what was technically theft.
I'll bet there was a lot of that! Especially if you count hardcopy.